


Fixing Korra S2 by Ignoring the Wan Beginning

by entirely_too_tall



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:54:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22601284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entirely_too_tall/pseuds/entirely_too_tall
Summary: Korra S2 introduces the very first Avatar, Wan, and how he started the whole Avatar Cycle. This is a tumblr listfic crossposted here to rid the timeline of that mistake. Unalaq invades the Southern Water Tribe because he's just that ass, no Dark Spirit required.
Kudos: 2





	Fixing Korra S2 by Ignoring the Wan Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> This is heavily influenced by the video [Legend of Korra's 'Beginnings' | An Overdue Critique](https://youtu.be/G1_SDy1nlbM) by Hello Future Me, which you absolutely should watch before reading this.
> 
> I also reference [Water Tribe](https://www.deviantart.com/noselfcontrol/art/Water-Tribe-001-69837313) by [Rufftoon](https://www.deviantart.com/rufftoon) hosted by No Self Control on DeviantArt, where a trivial detail is used in this narrative, and I thank them for the inspiration.
> 
> In passing, I also refer to [Embers](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5398503/1/Embers) by Vathara on FF for it's logical including of fire-healing (and also air-healing and earth-healing) as a counterpart to water-healing. 
> 
> Neither of these fics's narratives have been used here, I just want to shout out to them for some great details.

This [video](https://youtu.be/G1_SDy1nlbM) got me to thinking... Like, KorraS2 is almost universally loathed for being nonsensical camp by the end, and the reasons are put out here pretty well.

1\. Putting the unaddressed problems from S1 aside, Korra continued to really struggle to find her role as the Avatar in S2. In S1, as a mediator between different bender nations, she was pitted against non-benders, and so perceived as inherently taking a side. In S2, the two water tribes are entering a civil war, and she as born to the Southern WT and staying neutral is seen as betraying her tribe to the aggressor Northern WT. As Avatar, trying to stay neutral and balanced is her spiritual role, but as a human with ties she is pulled into geopolitics. Hence why Avatars are always trained to let go of earthly attachments. S2 set Korra up to require more training in becoming a fully realized Avatar, while also showing the limitations of a global entity on intervening in civil war. 

2\. The addition of corrupted spirits seeking to redress their neglected needs is actually ok. HeiBai required that its forest specifically be protected, similarly with the Painted Lady with her river and river villages. Having some unhappy spirits be a pretense for a civil war invasion is good geopolitical intrigue. Expanding bad spirits to become the reason behind geopolitical manipulations is weak. 

3\. Wan’s story in Beginnings is a fun exploration of a different art style, and could work as a conflicting mythos handed down from an isolated spiritual sect. Setting it up as the progenitor canonical mythos, makes it all much less compelling, as the video says. It forgets how spirits have no human morality, condemns Vattu as unequivocally bad and Raava as unequivocally good, makes lion turtles some sort of bending-power-reservoir while cheapening the human mythos of effort to emulate nature, and redefines the Avatar spirit as not an embodiment of balance, but as of good trying to overcome an Original Sin of unleashing Evil into the world. Let’s not with that Christian influence.

So here’s my suggested rewrite of Korra, with plot points interweaving between all 4 seasons, while removing all references to any supposed harmonic convergence nonsense. I’ll also reference the fancomic [Water Tribe](https://www.deviantart.com/noselfcontrol/art/Water-Tribe-001-69837313) by [Rufftoon](https://www.deviantart.com/rufftoon) hosted by No Self Control on DeviantArt, where spoiler alert, the Ocean Spirit leaves the Northern Water Tribe in the very last page. Nothing else from the comic is relevant, though it’s a really good story about Zhao, I just like the idea of the Ocean Spirit going on holiday.

  * So right after the war, the Ocean Spirit goes on holiday from Northern Water Tribe (NWT) and eventually ends up in Southern Water Tribe (SWT)  

  * And like, NWT panics but maintains the shrine, whatever  

  * Solstices and equinoxes let spirits come and go and new spirits come to stay in the NWT shrine like a BnB
    * that’s how the NWT gains knowledge on how to calm dark spirits, they learned how to deal with bad ShrineBnB guests
    * “The bunny spirits really don’t like sea prunes, will go bonkers. Otherwise nice guests, makes kids happy. 3.5 stars, would host again given prior notice to hide the prunes.”  

  * Also, lets be real, that ice prison under the shrine where they kept P’li was totally already there and used to keep/torture war criminals
    * but swept under the rug like Odin did in Thor Ragnarok which is why Eska+Desna and the rest of NWT didn’t know
    * there is no moral failing in ~~Ba Sing Se~~ NWT
  * fast forward to Yakone fleeing Republic City (RC), and I would make him leave to the further SWT instead of the closer NWT for narrative reasons
    * I know this is an editorial choice but I feel that NWT would not accept outsiders willy nilly while SWT, desperately in need of manpower to rebuild and further away to not have heard of the news of a bloodbender on the loose, would be more amenable to accepting a stranger waterbender
  * how did Yakone originally learn bloodbending? something something met Ocean Spirit something 
    * remember that spirits have no human morality and would not know that bloodbending is Bad
  * and now for something completely different!
  * that island with firebenders in a temple keeping sky bison?
  * It also has airbenders. real live bona fide airbenders that escaped persecution and went to their longtime firetemple friends 
  * they can create wind patterns to deflect ships from sailing to them
  * the islands are rocky and far away, the furthest west of the Fire Nation archipelago and in a part of the ocean not worth exploring during the period of wind powered ships
  * then the war came and steam powered ships didn’t really need to go west when the rest of the world was east so they stayed hidden by convenient geography, lazy explorers, and well kept secrets
  * there’s definitely some SWT members there too, which led to the intensified development of fire-healing and air-healing
    * look it’s ridiculous that only water benders can heal, and that lady definitely did some fire healing to Korra, so this is gonna be a thing
    * seriously, how did nobody ever stop to think, “huh, does my element also do this useful trick? wouldn’t it be weird if only water could do it?”
      * shout out to [Embers](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5398503/1/Embers) by Vathara on FF for actually making a fic out of this: Zuko can fire heal, complications ensue
  * but also like, this island is intentionally hard to get to too, and doesn’t get news too quick, so didn’t know the war ended, which has Implications
  * Implications meaning Zaheer was one of these Island Air Benders that just went crazy, like genocide survivors guilt trauma crazy, capture the Avatar as an infant and influence the baby to be a Dark Avatar crazy
    * who needs a dark spirit to hatch this plan. Vattu who?
  * The island finally gets news that the was has ended but indeed all Air Nomads except Aang had been killed and Aang brings some new air bison and air nomads out to Republic City because, come on, nobody wants to go to the edge of the world to Restore Balance
  * Restoring Balance should happen in Republic City where Benders Of Different Nations can Live In Harmony. It’s all so _symbolic_ there
  * I imagine this happens late enough that Aang is old and when Zaheer leaves, he falls in with the Red Lotus and he is the one that came up with Operation Kidnap Baby Avatar
    * Unalaq who
  * Also, this whole island of air nomads thing is to avoid harmonic convergence and requiring any Wan/Raava/Vattu story. It’s just all nonexistent.
    * Except maybe in this one small village somewhere that believe this competing origin myth. Wan Shi Tong has a copy written down in his library. He thinks it’s hilarious crackfic reading
  * **_now_** we get to the main story
  * S1 is pretty much ok, other than slight pacing issues and a better narrative extension of bender vs nonbender resentment into future seasons
    * Look, a large portion of humanity has physical power to coerce another part of humanity with threat of force, like bodily harm or property damage, but otherwise both have lived peacefully together for basically all of history. Just because crime is flourishing within Republic City doesn’t mean All Benders Are Bad, but it does expose the inherent power differential. Sound familiar? All Men Are Rapists familiar? Remember how _that_ has been solved?
    * my point is that it doesn’t get solved and, narratively speaking, should keep popping up later as a latent consideration. it’s not enough that a non-bender president get elected to Republic City as a slap-on narrative fix, people need to continually worry that they’ll be perceived as oppressors   

  * also, I’m personally not a fan of the whole evil-leader-secretly-one-of-the-mudbloods trope but it’s not that bad. I’ll add that Amon learns chi blocking and hides his bloodbending as just super-powerful chi blocking that’s “permanent” so his underlings don’t figure it out, and Katara does eventually figure it out  

  * anyway, it’s S2! ~Dark Spirits~ are attacking SWT! spooky! 
  * Tonraq accidentally destroyed NWT ShrineBnB-adjacent spiritual real estate and was banished, whereupon he went to SWT
  * this was totally manipulated into being by Unalaq, what a brother-hating bastard
    * but an Organic Home Grown brother-hating bastard, none of that Red Lotus or Chaos Spirit influence
    * he probably set loose some bunny spirits at Tonraq who was eating sea prunes. probably to downgrade their ShrineBnB rating too, because hiding prunes was too much of a hassle every time. 
    * what an asshole
  * but why are Dark Spirits attacking SWT? actually NOT Unalaq’s doing!
  * turns out, it’s the Ocean Spirit! GASP
    * (this is a very late plot reveal, we’re doing dramatic irony here)
  * Katara figures out bloodbending-chiblocking with help from the Ocean Spirit. and Yue probably
    * Aang doesn’t do that magical give-back-your-bending thing because it’s not energybending and he never learned bloodbending
  * The Ocean Spirit stuck around SWT after communing with Katara. but hidden. how convenient for our narrative
  * Tonraq doesn’t become SWT chief because come on, he’s an outsider. he’s just a nobody, whose kid is the Avatar, but still. 
    * he hauls sacks of prunes for a living is how he got that bod
    * with a bad back, because he’s a labourer and they’ve all got bad backs
  * Unalaq invades SWT as an excuse to Calm The Spirits, and also Your People Suck, look at Yakone and his Dirty Evil Progeny who developed their Evil Bloodbending in SWT
    * Uncivilised savages, reduced to living in camps, forgotten how to live harmoniously with spirits, only recently gaining money and power but still barbarians
    * Oh all that delicious Art Imitating Life
  * Why does the Dark Spirits? How Ocean Spirit can appease? 
    * Korra is tearing her hair out dealing with Unalaq and Varrick and also trying to figure out Dark Spirits
    * Unalaq himself doesn’t know, but hey use the field to your advantage, The Art of War by... Azulon? some fire lord wrote it
  * Much like our own Planet Earth but inverted, there is a continent landmass under the NWT but only ocean water under SWT. Knock knock, what’s this? 
  * Bombs. 
  * Sunken fire nation ships with explosives that the Ocean Spirit is just knocking into under the SWT city.
  * Those Dark Spirits are just emissaries/manifestations/water conjurations/whatever. Someone can improve on this if/when they write a fic based off this
  * The point is that Ocean spirit don’t care, Ocean Spirit is annoyed and Unalaq has nothing to do with it, he just wants to invade SWT
  * It’s eventually resolved by building ShrineBnb 2.0 in SWT, but it’s Jinora’s brilliant idea, because she’s ~spiritual~ that way
  * Unalaq is revealed to be a moral despot how? By P’Li escaping from prison due to Ocean Spirit returning to ShrineBnB 1.0, only to find _an entire prison under my shrine_?? ugh get it out of my way
  * Also, for easy teleportation, Ocean Spirit opens a portal between ShrineBnbs, which is not the same as the door in the show
    * that one is NWT <-> spirit world at the tree <-> SWT
    * this one is NWT <-> SWT directly
    * only the Avatar, spirit of the PLANET, literally did people forget the Avater is the planet?, can stand one foot in and one foot out
    * and when they shake it all about they can meditate easily into the spirit world to meet Uncle Iroh, because we definitely still need that
  * Unalaq: “But these people tried to kill the Avatar! I was protecting the fate of humanity! The White Lotus forced me to keep the prisoner!”
  * Yeah, but you didn’t have to torture her and keep her in solitary. Like, a daily rotation of chiblockers with her meals would have been enough.
  * So geopolitics moves on, NWT and SWT are still unhappy with each other, Varrick is exposed but runs away, no magical cohabitation with spirits necessary, no new airbender nonsense.
  * P’Li releases her other Red Lotus friends, the plot goes on as usual. Bumi isn’t an airbender, and neither is Opal. Kai can just be a kid in the temple seduced by the easy pickings of the badboy lifestyle in RC
  * the Krew goes to Zaofu because of a tip off that Varrick is there and RC popo Lin and Asami get roped into going to extradite him because relations to negotiate better? 
  * Korra and Bolin tag along to try to learn metalbending, Mako is just caught in the middle
  * the rest basically unfolds the same way, without an airbender search and training montage. I know Bumi becomes less fleshed out as a character as a result I’m sorry :(
  * S4, varrick still uncaught, now with Kuvira. does he invent Spirit Power Lasers? no. He makes uranium bombs
  * Uranium ores are actually very common, and are insoluble in magma, so it floats on it. They find uranium ore on the ground after the lavabending in Zhaofu concentrates it. Varrick plays with it and discovers it goes boom
    * Ok so actual uranium enrichment and bomb physics is very difficult to accomplish, taking hundreds of scientists and engineers to figure out, thankfully
    * but artistic license and Varrick’s genius and for the narrative
  * Turns out, the fire nation, with its abundance of volcanoes, has lots of uranium ore it doesn’t know what to do with! Sure, the rich metalbending state can pay us to take it away if they found some weird metalbending way to use it! We need a lot of money!
  * oh btw all this while Amon and Red Lotus wannabes terrorize RC, further worsening the bender-nonbender relations, this is a detail to continue the S1 narrative  

    * Amonymous wear the same mask as Amon, you know how it be
    * Red Lotus is alt-peace
    * you choose their flavor of rule-breaking
  * and then Kuvira wants to invade RC and nonbenders are being all smug about it like “see? all you benders ever do is get power crazy”
  * anyway people have seen movers of her demonstration of one of Varrick’s bombs and are rightfully scared shitless but like, don’t want to outright surrender
  * also, giant mecha with uranium bomb powered laser canon is still a thing, I guess? we’re being a bit lax with physics here because giant mechas won’t work anyway so why not 
  * but anyway, Kuvira is defeated with the Power of Friendship and Asskicking, no new portal to the spirit world opens, and Varrick is arrested for war crimes
  * Korra and Asami take a holiday to funky spiritual island in West Fire Nation instead, to procrastinate having to deal with their nonbender disapproval ratings
  * The End
  * look we can say Ocean Spirit portal is the same as show portal and let spirits invade and let Varrick develop spirit bombs and opens a RC portal but that takes away the mystique of spirits
  * like, I love the sequences of the spirit world and its weirdness but they act too humanlike or animal-like, rather than I Have A Function And I Will Only Fulfil That Function And No Other which is rather mundane honestly
  * if someone would write this I would die of joy



**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. Come find me on [tumblr](http://ohjustletmewriteinpeace.tumblr.com/).


End file.
